Video poker was ex-mayor's vice

San Diego  The addiction to gambling does not discriminate. It strikes across all echelons of society, devastating the finances, jobs and families of everyone from doctors and police officers to college students and retirees.

It is now blamed for the undoing of former San Diego Mayor Maureen O’Connor, sinking her deep into debt and resulting in a federal charge of making an unlawful transaction with $2 million in embezzled funds.

Video poker was her vice, according to federal court records, as it is for many women who seek escape from bigger problems.

“It’s not about the money. It’s about how it’s making her feel,” said Dr. Suzanne Pike, an Escondido psychologist who treats addicts at her San Diego Center for Pathological Gambling. “It’s a smoke screen for what she’s not dealing with.”

The hours of play at slot machines can put addictive gamblers in a trance-like state, flooding the body with beta endorphins and also releasing dopamine, hitting on the “reward center” of the brain.

“It’s like she’s sitting in there with a morphine drug in her arm,” Pike said of longtime female addicts.

Slot machines usually hold an allure for people who want to feel numb, while playing the tables — poker, blackjack and other action games — is geared more toward social interaction and ego-building, experts say.

In Pike’s nearly 20 years of treating gamblers, she has noticed many similarities in those addicted to video poker.

They are usually middle-aged to older women, divorced, and have had a lot of losses or disappointment in their lives that have piled up without being dealt with, she said.

In the case of O’Connor, 66, the gambling followed the death of her husband, Jack in the Box co-founder Robert O. Peterson, as well as the passings of siblings and close friends, said her attorney, Eugene Iredale.

“Compulsive, lunatic gambling,” he said.

“This pattern fits the syndrome known as ‘grief gambling,’” Iredale wrote in a memo to the court.

O’Connor frequented casinos in San Diego, Las Vegas and Atlantic City, winning $1 billion over nine years and losing more than that amount during the same period, according to federal court documents. Her attorney put her net gambling loss at $13 million over the nine-year span.

Her exact gambling habits were not detailed, including how often she played or how big her wagers were.

To feed her addiction, she sold off real estate holdings, auctioned off personal belongings and finally embezzled $2 million from her late husband’s charitable foundation, federal records state.

Experts say the tendency to commit crime is high with gambling addictions.

But treatment can help, and judges have been known to order rehabilitation and probation in these kinds of cases, as has been done in O’Connor’s case.

“That’s not to say some gamblers aren’t criminals. Certainly some are, but most of these people are good people who managed to rewire and rewrite their brains because of gambling,” Pike said.

Addiction to gambling is considered an impulse-control illness, akin to compulsions to pull out hair, shop or steal.